By Damian Foley

You have to be flexible to excel in the classrooms of the Lundquist College of Business, the cricket fields of India, the corporate boardrooms of Silicon Valley, and the head offices of the PGA of America.

Some might attribute it to “transferrable skills,” the hallmark of a liberal arts education.

The PGA of America called it “innovative”—literally, as in the chief innovation officer position they created earlier this year for UO alumnus Arjun Chowdri, MBA ’03.

Per the PGA, Chowdri “will be responsible for fostering a culture of innovation, idea generation and free thinking at the Association and throughout the game of golf.”

If that sounds like a broad description, it is. Chowdri and his department have been given full authority to innovate wherever they see fit to help grow and improve the game.

“Examples of this could be agriculture technology, retail, education technology, wellness, and hospitality,” Chowdri said. “There's probably a student right now at Oregon, or Georgia Tech, or Howard, and she's working on robotics to help automate farming.

“What she's not thinking about is taking that same technology and adjusting it to create autonomous maintenance of golf courses. If she could do that, what's the potential of the labor costs? What downstream impact on profit margins in ability to spend more resources on engaging people in the sport? There are examples like that across numerous industries.”

If any alumnus has experience dealing with numerous industries, it may well be Chowdri. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago in 2001, then moved to the West Coast to get his master’s in business administration from the UO’s Lundquist College of Business.

“Chicago was an amazing place that helped me learn and think about how to analyze problems,” Chowdri said. “I was looking to supplement that with a better understanding of how to apply that knowledge into specific disciplines.

“I had never done marketing, and thought it might be an interesting area. I started looking at programs, specifically in the sports marketing and sports management fields, and came across Oregon. At that time the Warsaw Center in the Lundquist College of Business was the only MBA program like that. That’s what attracted me to the program.”

 The ink was barely dry on his MBA before he began putting his newly acquired sports marketing skills to use.

“I went immediately into sponsorship marketing and specific consultancies,” he said. “I went to a company called Velocity Sports and Entertainment, which is now part of Aegis.”

During Chowdri’s two years with Velocity, he served as a sponsorship consultant for the likes of Visa and AOL. That was followed by a further two years with Genesco Sports Enterprises, where he helped Pepsi and Motorola with their NFL partnerships.

“A fun project on the Pepsi side was something we did when Reggie Bush was drafted in the NFL,” said Chowdri of a promotion that won a Webby Award in 2007 for best sports website. “We created a program called the Reggie Bush Project, where we followed Reggie Bush around and pretended to be an avid fan, connecting to various aspects of his life to give people an insider’s view.

“Probably the most exciting aspect of that was a program we ran called Yard By Yard. For whichever kind of yard he gained, we gave him money to help rebuild New Orleans, which had just suffered damage from Hurricane Katrina. We worked with a company called Rebuilding Together to actually rebuild homes in the area.”

After handling partnerships for the NFL, the sports league that averages more fans per game than any other, Chowdri then turned his attention to a sports league that, at the time, did not even exist.

In 2007, in cricket-mad India, the sport’s governing body announced a new tournament called the Indian Premier League. Using the game’s shortest format, a three-hour version called Twenty20 (as opposed to the versions that last anywhere from one to five days), the IPL had eight teams scattered throughout the country, international superstar players, and Fortune 500 companies and Bollywood stars as team owners.

It had everything, in fact, except fans.

And that’s where Chowdri came in.

“I was 26 and had my early life crisis, and said I would really love to understand my heritage and my motherland on a deeper level,” he said. “I’d gone there for summer vacations, but it’s one thing to stay in your grandparents’ house and another thing to really live there and immerse yourself in a culture. So, I resigned from my job and moved out there.”

Chowdri was hired as the general manager of new business by DNA Entertainment Networks, a partner of the Royal Challengers Bangalore franchise. He helped with the IPL’s opening and closing ceremonies, but also implemented India’s first sports e-ticketing system to ensure cricket fans in the nation of 1.3 billion would be able to attend the matches.

“It was fun,” Chowdri said. “I got thrown right in the mix. It was a good time and it was crazy to learn, and see the development of what is now really a powerhouse in the global sports landscape.”

How much of a powerhouse? When DNA tasked Chowdri with overseeing ticketing in 2007, the league only existed on paper. It is now the fifth-best attended sports league in the world—when measured in average attendance per game—and has a value of $6.3 billion.

He stayed in India with DNA for just a year, then returned to the USA to work for Glaceau, where he spent the next four years overseeing Powerade and NOS Energy’s sports and entertainment marketing initiatives. Six months after joining Glaceau, the company was bought out by Coca-Cola. That lead to a period of upheaval which, for Chowdri, was a great learning opportunity.

“A lot of the people who had developed the company from nothing were still there,” he said. “We learned how they were with supercharging a business. In a marketing sense, we were fortunate to be part of the broader Coca-Cola company. They’re committed to educating employees in that career development aspect, and I was able to learn a lot about the idea that marketing is, I’d say, 90 percent science and 10 percent art.

“I learned side-by-side with everyone else what it took to be successful in a large corporation, both from a personal perspective but also a business perspective. Just making sure we had the discipline and rigor in place to make sure, for example, that the sales group had what they needed to sell the product at a really aggressive level.”

At that point Chowdri was just nine years removed from the UO but had already worked with the NFL and the Indian Premier League, and had managed marketing on behalf of multiple Fortune 500 companies. To most people that would be a successful career, but when a former business contact Chowdri knew from his time at Velocity called, and suggested the young Duck move to Atlanta to work for the PGA of America, he found he was ready for a new challenge.

“He recruited me, and at that point it was a good time in our life,” he said. “My wife and I were pregnant with our first kid, and we said, ‘Okay, we’re living in New York, in Brooklyn. Maybe we should take a moment to see what suburban life is like.’ The PGA was exciting because it was a great brand with a lot of potential but wasn’t being as optimized as much as possible. I got excited by the idea of taking what were already good assets and just tuning them up a bit and helping [the association] grow.”

The PGA of America hired Chowdri as its senior director of marketing and communications in 2012. One of his first moves was to bring the public relations and marketing departments together to work more cohesively.

“For us, and for a lot of sports organizations, PR came way before marketing,” said Chowdri. “PR came because there were press conferences with athletes and players, and there were crises. It was a reactive thing more than a proactive thing. Later, as the brand started to become bigger, marketing started to matter more. The different groups don’t always understand and appreciate each other as much as they should.

“You have to make sure there’s a sharing process. One of the neat things you have now is technology tools that are evolving to help you in that process. Whether it’s Trello, or Asana, or whatnot, there are tools that can better enable collaboration between the different groups. You don’t bring them together and it’s solved. You bring them together and then you start the work.”

Three years in that position were followed by four years as the PGA’s senior director of global and corporate strategy, until earlier this year when the association named Chowdri its first ever chief innovation officer.

While the position itself is brand new, Chowdri sees it as more of an evolution of the work he’s already done with the PGA.

“It’s very much an expansion of some of my previous responsibilities, in particular global development,” he said. “The easiest way to explain it is, it’s really to identify and lead our nontraditional opportunities.

“The PGA of America is really unique. We are a not-for-profit trade association, 29,000 professionals who are really at their heart driving the golf industry forward. They’re anything from your local golf coach to a director of golf operations to the general manager of a course. They’re that tangible connection to the game. Our mission is about elevating the industry as a whole, and growing the sport—how are we supporting organizations that are promoting membership in the game?”

Chowdri is already making his presence felt. The PGA now has international employment career services, to help members find job opportunities internationally. They created a partnership in China called Pacific Pine Sports, placing PGA academies throughout China. In April, the PGA acquired NextGen Golf, a company that organizes tournaments for students and adults alike.

“What’s exciting about them is they’ve been really focused on that high school, college, and young professional group, creating ways to engage them in the game,” he said. “It’s a natural extension from the youth programming to here, into the adult program we have already developed. I’m excited to bring them into the fold.”

 Beyond that, Chowdri is looking at agriculture technology, retail spaces, and more to help grow the game worldwide.

“How do we have our finger on the pulse to capitalize on the number of innovations in a sector to better the golf industry?” he said. “Things like virtual reality, or neuroscience, and on and on.”

While he oversees the PGA’s innovation department, he considers all 29,000 PGA members to be part of his team. Good ideas can come from anywhere, at any time—a lesson he learned back when he was working on his master’s degree in the UO’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center.

“I finished my undergraduate a bit early, so I was traditionally the youngest person in the room at Oregon, or one of them,” Chowdri said. “The program was great at creating group learning exercises and projects. What I learned from that is that there’s value in youth and experience, and great outcomes only come when both groups are good listeners.”

Now one of the older voices in the room, Chowdri makes it a point to listen to the newcomers whenever possible. Not only can good ideas come from anywhere, but with the right mentoring and encouragement, good leaders can too.

“Now I’m more experienced, so I make sure I’m listening to some of the less experienced people,” he said. “That type of fresh thinking creates really great ideas. How do you marry those ideas with experience to come up with the best outcomes? And, vice versa, I make sure I listen and learn from [more] experienced people and organizations to come up with great solutions and strategies.

“I recently had lunch with one of our interns. She said, ‘Thank you so much for the time.’ I was like, ‘No, thank you. My goal is that one day I work for you, or some other intern. That would make me super happy.’”

Damian Foley is the assistant director of marketing and communications.